Hallberg Rassy For Sale

Monday, 14 September 2015

Across the dateline

The tedium of those days
without wind is already receding. All it takes is one night of uninterrupted sleep
in a calm anchorage for the essential tones of a long passage to begin to gel. It
is not so much the weak trade winds which are taking up most space in my memory
of those nine days now but the emptiness of the Pacific ocean.

Between 151W and 175W, and between the latitudes of 15S and 18S , there
was nothing which blemished the ocean’s clean skin except for the wind. We saw
no large mammals or schools of fish. We
saw very few sea birds. We saw no great patches of weed, or those notorious
accumulations of plastics.We saw no
container ships or fishing boats.

It wasn’t until we were
within about 30 nautical miles of Vava’u that a vessel showed up on our AIS
screen.It was the super-yacht M5,
making 8.2 knots under power, in 22 knots of breeze. She took a long time to
catch us. We were making 7.5 knots under sail.

M5 in Neiafu harbour, Vava'u island, Tonga

There was one unwelcome
object which floated past us a couple of hours after sunrise one morning –
fortunately at a distance of about 20 m off our lee side.Alex spotted it in the2.5 m swell.It was 4 m square of lashed-together timbers, a traditional raft. We gave
thanks that we had not collided with it at night.

The nights were very dark, what
moonlight there was at the beginning of the passage too quickly waning into
irrelevance. But on cloudless nights,
the light from the milky universe was brighter than I have ever known.And the wind was warm.Those were the dreamy nights which our
friends on Galactic, who are wintering over in Patagonia, asked us to enjoy for
their sake as well as ours. We did both.

That's Tonga

Sailing on a flat sea in the lee of Vava'u

The squat islands of Vava'u came as a surprise

On our first full day in
Tonga, we are cleaning ourselves, our laundry and the boat.And we have been waiting for news of our
friend Marce. She is very much on our mind.

When we slipped our mooring 10
days ago, Marce was standing on the lower steps of Escape Velocity’s starboard
hull, waving goodbye and blowing kisses. “See you in Tonga,” we shouted, and we
believed we would. They’d be starting a bit behind the crowd if they left in a
couple of weeks, but they had time up their sleeves. They could still get to
New Zealand before the (insurance-driven) beginning of cyclone season.

What was standing in their
way was uncertainty about what was going on with Marce.Two weeks earlier she’d been floored by
intense sciatic pain which didn’t go away.She’s rebound, and then she’d regress again.

Alex helped as he was able.Then Jack organized for a local doctor to
come to the boat.

We agreed we wanted to see
her on the mend before we departed for Tonga.

On Friday, 4 September, we
decided we could go. Marce had been moving about on the boat for a couple of
days. That morning she sat in the EV cockpit with us, her back straight and her
legs crossed, chatting, laughing, keeping Jack busy, as she does. Marce is a
“hard-headed woman”, to quote Cat Stevens. She’s doesn’t lie down easily, but this pain
had her pinned to the bed for day after day. When we saw the light back in her
eyes, we felt ok about leaving her.

Jack and Marce - on Tahiti, on a happier occasion

But we jumped the gun
(thankfully, their good friends, Mark and Sue on Macushla, arrived in Bora Bora
soon after our departure). She regressed
while we were at sea. The next step for her was to go to Tahiti and “get it
sorted”, she wrote. Easier said than done when you’re bed-bound on a boat.

While I was writing this,
word came that they’d just docked in Papeete. They’d motored for 33 hours,
because their sail-handling needs two hands on deck. Jack kept watch the entire
time. It was undoubtedly a tough overnight passage for both of them.

They would head for the
hospital after they’d rested a couple of hours, she wrote. “All is well. Help
is on the way.”

Now that’s heroic.

PS We've crossed the dateline - Ikale lager, made in the Kingdom of Tonga, claims to be "the first beer in the world everyday". We'll drink to that - and to finally bringing Enki onto the same day of the week as our family in Australia and New Zealand.

1 comment:

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About Us

In mid-2011 we bought a Hallberg Rassy 48 in the south of France, and called her Enki II. In April 2012 we began living aboard. We stayed a while in the Mediterranean. In May 2014, we left Turkey and headed west, crossing the Atlantic in January 2015. For various reasons we decided to keep pushing west rather than loiter in the Caribbean. Between us and home was the Pacific Ocean. In November 2015, we arrived in New Zealand. We will be cruising the north island of NZ this summer before returning to our home in Sydney, Australia. Enki II will remain in NZ.
Our previous two yachts were both Swedish built, a Hallberg Rassy 42E "Andiamo" and a Malo 39 Classic "Kukka".